My Global Sports Cultures Syllabus

This fall, I’ll be inaugurating a new course at Michigan: Comparative Literature 100: Global Sports Cultures. The aims of the course include introducing students to a necessarily narrow slice of global sports culture, familiarizing them with concepts useful in thinking critically about sports, and developing what you might call their “literary skills” as critical readers and clear, coherent, thoughtful and honest writers.

We’ll take C. L. R. James’ rhetorical question from Beyond a Boundary—“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”—as our guiding challenge. And, to meet that challenge, we’ll refer to Ben Carrington and David Andrews more fleshed out description of the tasks of students of sport:

“to think about sport as an escape from everyday life whilst understanding that no cultural activity is completely autonomous from societal constraints, to examine sport as a form of cultural struggle, resistance, and politics whilst recognizing that it is also compromised by forms of commodification, commercialization, and bureaucratic control, and to consider sport as an embodied art form that is formed in relation to both intrinsic and extrinsic goals and rewards that sometimes over-determine the stated aims of participants” (“Introduction: Sports as Escape, Struggle, and Art” from Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies Volume 37: Companion to Sport [John Wiley and Sons, 2013])

I’ve learned so much in doing the research to prepare the course syllabus, including how much I don’t know about global sports culture and how many brilliant writers, journalists, scholars, athletes, and film and video directors there are out there who know a great deal and generously share their knowledge in interesting ways. I’m very excited to teach the course and so thought I’d share the basic reading schedule for the course, the fourteen weeks of which I’ve grouped, by lecture topic, into four broad units.

(A note on the course format: I offer a lecture to the entire group of 100 students on Mondays. They then break into 5 different discussion sections of 20 students each. Those sections meet on either Tuesdays and Thursdays or Wednesdays and Fridays. As you’ll see, I’ve front loaded the week’s reading assignments, leaving Thursdays and Fridays to the discretion of the instructor and students of each individual discussion section.)

READ: Johan Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon, “from Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), pp. 1-27 (PDF in 2 parts in CTools).

T 9.16or

W 9.17

WATCH: “PSA: Save the Children – Running Around the World” (Save the Children Canada, 2009) (YouTube link in CTools).

WATCH: “The Race” clip from the film Children of Heaven (Iran, d. Majid Majidi, 1997) (YouTube link in CTools).

READ: Haruki Murakami, “Who’s Going to Laugh at Mick Jagger,” from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (New York: Vintage, 2008), pp. 3-23 (PDF in CTools).

READ C.L. Cole, “Nike’s America/America’s Michael Jordan,” in Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America, Ed. by David L. Andrews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 65-103 (PDF In CTools).

READ: Dave Zirin, excerpt from A People’s History of Sport in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play (New York: The New Press, 2008), pp. 156-175 (PDF in CTools).

Amy Bass, “The Race between Politics and Sport,” from Not the Triumph But the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 1-35 (PDF in CTools).

Th 11.13or

F 11.14

Week 10: Autonomy, The Case of Muhammad Ali

Date

What to read or watch at home:

M 11.17

READ: C.L.R. James, “Black Power,” (1967) (PDF in CTools)

T 11.18or

W 11.19

WATCH: When We Were Kings (1996, D. Leon Gast, United States) (YouTube link in CTools).

Jonathan Culler, “Narrative,” “Performative Language,” and “Identity, Identification, and the Subject,” from Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 82-120 (PDF in CTools)

T 12.9or

W 12.10

Selections from Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy (New York: ESPN Books, 2010), pp. 3-56 (PDF in CTools)

“Court of Opinion” from New York Magazine, December, 2009 (PDF in CTools)

Noah Cohan, “Rewriting Sport and Self: Fan Self-Reflexivity and Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball,” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture2 (2013): 133-145 (PDF in CTools)

5 comments

Looks interesting for sure! How did you decide to have a week focusing just on Venus, as opposed to both of the Williams sisters? Their careers are so closely linked to each other, particularly the first 10 years or so of their pro careers.

That’s a really good question. I have to say it was just on the basis of how much I liked Venus Vs. I planned to talk about of them, but maybe I should look into adding a reading or some other material specifically on Serena or on them as a pair.